Nuts and Bolts: Instructional Design 101—Be a Learner

“To learn more about ID, be a learner. Learn something way out of your usual area. Go see how 20 other
people designed for that topic. You’ll find some are naturally better teachers than others. Take from them
lessons about what’s best.”

In my line of work there’s a lot of conversation about
instructional design and common design flaws, and I spend a lot of time
evaluating eLearning courses and products. I find it helps my perspective
immensely when I set out to learn something new for myself, the more unrelated
to work, the better.

I’m presently helping to plan an event for people primarily
involved in workplace learning, innovation, and technology. We were talking
about maker sessions, and I joked that we should have a ukulele orchestra. This
got me thinking that playing the ukulele might be fun. I rummaged around and found
the souvenir uke my mother bought on a trip to Hawaii when I was 9, which as
far as I know was never even tuned.

Now, I’m a guitar player—giving music lessons is what first
led me to the training business—so I wasn’t starting from scratch. I know how
to tune a stringed instrument, form chords, pick out a melody, and strum, even
if my experience has been with something with six strings, different chords,
and somewhat different tuning. I went in with a pretty good idea of what I
needed to learn and what I didn’t.

So I turned to YouTube.

The learner
experience

There are hundreds of videos on learning to play ukulele and
particular songs on the ukulele, and not surprisingly—just like eLearning
courses—they are all over the place in terms of content and intent and quality.
Most were made by musicians at home who want to share, some made by people
offering lessons at cost, a few selling a product like videos or books.

The experience was like a crash “ID 101” course, with
shining examples of good, bad, better, and awful. Here are some takeaways:

Use
effective, clear titles. Help people decide what’s right for them. Trust
that they often know what that is.

Get on
with it already (aka: Shut up and play). Some of the video creators went
on… and on… about ukes, and wood, and tuning, and what kind of chair they were
sitting in, and what a guitar store in your town might have if you went there …
before finally getting to the lesson proper. Lucky for me, YouTube has a
scrubber bar. If the video is titled “How to Play ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’” then
teach that. Put the setup and the background and asides somewhere else like an intro
module, or divide the lesson into Parts 1 and 2. Recognize that someone wanting
to learn “Bohemian Rhapsody” probably already knows how to tune the thing
anyway. Also: Recognize when you’re trying to cover too much in one bite.

Know your
audience. Find out what most of them already know. Look over what already
exists and don’t replicate that needlessly. Decide who you are pitching to: Are
you trying to help the novice or the one like me, who has some background or prior
training with the topic? Or the advanced player? (Folk musician Marcy Marxer
offers a series of lessons called “Ukulele for Guitar Players.” There’s an example of knowing your
audience.)

Help the
learner keep up. Break the song into parts. Play it once at half-speed
before moving to full speed.

Draw a
picture. It was amazing to see how many people would just talk on and on
about things begging to be shown as images, like how to form chords: “Okay, put
your index finger on the first string third fret, and then put your pinkie on
the third string fourth fret…” There are several tools that will let you add
chord diagrams and other notation to videos so you can follow along as the
tutor plays (and see how she or he is placing fingers). One did home-drawn
chord diagrams on paper and held them up to the camera. One drew the chords on
a whiteboard, then filmed himself playing in front of it. (Note: Failing to
recognize that the right picture is in fact worth a thousand words happens in
training and eLearning. All. The. Time.)

Before you
start teaching: Play the song. There are lots of ways of playing “Ain’t
Misbehavin’” in several different keys. Two videos showed more or less what I
wanted and felt I could do, with chords easy enough for me to play as a uke
beginner. Many videos don’t begin with showing the final product or an example
of the final performance, so I had to skip to the end to see if the version of
the song being taught was even the one I wanted to learn.

Provide
follow-up support. The best “how to play this song” videos offered a link
to the written music, the chord diagrams, or the tutorial for an advanced
version.

Leave the
ferrets out. Many videos are shot in a living room or kitchen, and an
inordinate number had cats and, in one case, a ferret, frolicking in the
background. It was mesmerizing, and a delightful distraction from the lesson. And
it reminded me a lot of clicky-clicky-bling-bling flashing buttons and
irrelevant art and distractors you see in eLearning courses.

What didn’t matter?
I remember the lessons that were the most helpful, not the ones that were
prettiest or had the highest production value. I remember learning quickly from
the tutor who had clearly rehearsed and planned out structure and order, and
didn’t keep saying, “Oh, wait, I forgot to show you this thing…” I remember
that the diagrams on a whiteboard were more helpful than the ones done with expensive
software showing real-time animated musical notation.

Be a learner

So: To learn more about ID, be a learner. Learn something far
out of your usual area. Go see how 20 other people designed for that topic. You’ll
find some are naturally better teachers than others. Take lessons from them about
what’s best. Note how they make it happen effectively online. Become more
mindful of how you learn: what works for you, and how quickly, and how much
effort and time you are willing to put into learning.

And let me know if you take up the ukulele. We
can start a Google Hangout band.

When keeping the focus on the future in 2012, it’s important to include your own ongoing
professional development as part of the picture. If you’re new to the instructional design and
eLearning fields, it’s good to look at what those who are established have done to develop
themselves. If you’re an established practitioner, compare notes. Here are some tips from a top
professional!

Designers really need to know a lot about how people think and interact, yet so much of what we “know” turns out to be urban myth when researchers investigate. Fortunately, Susan Weinschenk has provided a handy, accessible, and affordable reference that fills in gaps and debunks the myths. Read the review here!

There are heated debates about whether every instructional designer should have formal training, and about the pros and cons of academic instructional design programs. But in the meantime, you have to get the work done. Here are eight basic points that every instructional designer should commit to memory.